Chronic pain and depression live with me not the other way around!
"God uses pain and tribulation to make things right in our lives" courtesy of The African American Devotional Bible King James Version
You'll find no whining and complaining here! Love your life - it's a gift! **Tag Free Blog**

This year we scaled back on the Christmas gifts for the adults. Christmas, at our house, was all about the kids! I'm so glad we decided to do a little tree this year. Everyone really liked the decorations.

No early wakeups. The kids opened their gifts around 11 am. It gave me plenty of time to make breakfast and enjoy a cup of coffee.

The girls received new pajamas. A traditional Christmas gift when I was growing up.

Gaia wore her new thermal pajamas from Old Navy. Everyone thought she looked adorable in them.

Hubby and I decided to take a walk through Target's Christmas section. I'm so glad I did because I found these adorable people ornaments. This gal just had to have them. At $3.99 each I quickly added them to the cart! They look great on our Christmas tree.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

No written or oral recipe for the dish. I just added fresh chopped vegetables that would compliment pork. Organic butternut squash, sweet potato, and carrots were uniformly chopped. I then cut the pork into similar sizes to the veggies.

The next step was to layer each vegetable in the Dutch oven evenly based on cooking time. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash, carrots, and pork. (I did roast the butternut squash for 30 minutes prior to added it to the dish) Just salt and pepper each layer. Eyeballed the level of water to 1/4 full.

I turned the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Set the kitchen timer to 1 hour. (our old oven runs hot)

Oh! I did add fresh green beans at the final 5 minutes of cooking. Let the Dutch oven sit on the counter for a 30 minutes with the top on.

Thank you to Elisabeth Holmes, Wall Street Journal, for asking me to be part of "A New Style of Baby Talk" article. I had a great time participating. I guess you just never really know who's reading your tweets!

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

I decided that I would turn our yearly Thanksgiving dinner choice into a teaching moment for our oldest granddaughter. I found this cute election printables on Pinterest. Thank you Dab A Bit Of Glue for providing them.

The ballots listed 2 food options: Chinese takeout and American cuisine. American cuisine. The poll opened around 9 am this morning. My husband and son took advantage of early voting to case their votes.

I closed the poll at 3PM PST. At 4:30PM PST, the results were announced. Chinese take out had 4 votes and American cuisine had 1. We will be having Chinese take out for Thanksgiving dinner this year!